Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract new traffic is add fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically start to get visitors when you begin to post new content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide and businesses are researching every advantage they can that can help you increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a flying start from the moment your site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is more labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is humming along in the gizmo assembly plant when suddenly, production grinds to a complete stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
The expert arrives within in less than 30 minutes and, without saying a word, heads out immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for less than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny little hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 1 cm from the left-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, everything starts working once again.
The floor manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your blog set up so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges may seem ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get desired results
- Which options you need to configure in order to make sure everything works as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various external sites and services.
Integration With External Services
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content gets published from a central location (your site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content pointing back to your website gets automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will benefit from added exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings to speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential information, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site data with Google Search Console have been set up, the information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, traffic monitoring data can be integrated with WordPress via a simple plugin and instantly fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account is with Bing are set up, you can use your information to integrate and automate traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new traffic to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different sites and platforms you can add to your own web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
Configuring WordPress
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your content, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their own networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social sharing to your website easily using WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – WP Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your website, many themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Other Configuration Steps For Your WordPress Site
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about why it’s important to have a compliant website here:
Post Categories & Post Tags
WordPress post categories & tags help search engines index your web pages, which improves traffic.
(WordPress categories help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and post categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is code that only search bots can understand. Although Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong URL or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically start attracting traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process typically takes some website professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic organically using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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